


watered down and fully grown

by FreshBrains



Category: The Craft (1996)
Genre: Community: femslashex, F/F, Getting Back Together, Graduation, Magic, POV Rochelle, Post-Movie(s), Underage Smoking, Witchcraft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-29
Updated: 2016-10-29
Packaged: 2018-08-24 07:43:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8363755
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FreshBrains/pseuds/FreshBrains
Summary: The fall before graduation, Rochelle does something she’s been meaning to do for a long time—she gets a freakin’ clue.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ijemanja](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ijemanja/gifts).



> I hope you enjoy this! I had a lot of fun with these two. Beta'd by a RL friend.

The fall before graduation, Rochelle does something she’s been meaning to do for a long time—she gets a freakin’ clue.

It comes in the form of six college brochures spread out like tarot cards on her duvet. When she closes her eyes and chooses one, the card stock feels heavy and supple in her hands. She knows which school it is before she even looks—Burke University, located clear on the other side of the country in drab, chilly New England.

It’s far away and old and full of interesting possibilities. It’s away from this town, these people, the way that Rochelle thought she could be oh-so-powerful and create _real_ change. It’s everything that scares Rochelle, so she applies.

It makes her think of when she and Bonnie were in junior high and they used to play “teenagers”—both of them were so sheltered at that point that they thought teenhood was _decades_ off, like they had all the time in the world to grow into their bad skin and unruly hair, their penchant for odd hobbies.

Bonnie would sit in the driver’s seat of her mom’s Chevy Malibu, hands on the unmoving wheel, sunglasses propped up over her hair in the dark garage. “Want to go the mall, Rochelle?”

Rochelle would smile, always willing to play along, and flip her curls over her shoulder. “You know it! Then we’ll meet the guys for lunch and go on a double date at the Hollywood Bowl.” They almost never went into the city—for all their bravado, it scared them senseless. Hollywood was for _women_ , not girls.

It was fun, playing at being grown, but in the end, neither of them had any idea what they were getting into. She thinks that maybe she misses those days when it was just her and Bonnie against the world, but there’s no use dwelling on what cannot be changed.

*

_Cool fingers trail down Rochelle’s back, feeling each bump and ridge of her spine, stroking her skin like she’s something to be treasured. The hand moves back up before settling in a comforting weight at the base of her neck._

_“You’re so warm,” a voice says, low and almost abashed, and Rochelle opens her eyes._

_Bonnie is lying next to her on the bed, but it’s not_ her _bed, not Rochelle’s small bedroom. It’s only a bed draped in white linen in a sea of nothing, a sea of darkness, lit by three red candles floating above them._

_“Just me,” Bonnie whispers, and smiles, cuddling into Rochelle’s side. She’s miles of soft skin, her scars a distant memory. Her dark hair fans out across the white pillows. “Only me,” she says, this time even softer, and kisses Rochelle’s shoulder, eyes hooded._

_Rochelle wants to speak, wants to ask_ why now, when we’ve broken so completely _, but words won’t come. Her body betrays her, eye closing, a moan rising in her throat as Bonnie curls in closer, breasts pushing against Rochelle’s arm._

 _“Do you ever dream of me?” Bonnie asks, hand drifting down between Rochelle’s legs, and then, like an illusion, like_ magic _, the world disappears._

*

Rochelle is back in her old bedroom, the sounds of the waking city murmuring outside her window, her Olympic posters and stuffed animals illuminated by the streetlamps. She smells a hint of smoke and leans over to see red wax dripping down her night table and puddling at the floor, still steaming.

Rochelle never lights candles when she sleeps.

“Shit,” she murmurs, getting up to pee and grab a smoke before her alarm could do the job. She’s been trying to quit, but between not speaking to Bonnie and worrying about Nancy, she thinks she’s allowed to enjoy a Camel Blue once in a while. She wills away the ache between her thighs as she moves through the morning-quiet house and out to the breezeway, trying not to wake her family.

It’s winter in Los Angeles, which means a chilly morning and seasonable afternoons, so she pulls her boots and a thermal top on over her pajamas. An old Honda rumbles down the street, some blue-collar worker on their way to the plant, and the flowering gum trees are like blood against the murky sunrise.

She holds a cigarette to her lips, but before she can flick on her Hello Kitty lighter, the tip begins to burn.

“Gotcha,” a nervous voice says from the end of the driveway, and Rochelle doesn’t have to look up to know it’s Bonnie. Bonnie, who belongs in this old bungalow as much as Rochelle does, who looks both at home and out of place in the cracked façade of Los Angeles, who is so alarmingly beautiful in the morning haze that Rochelle thinks for a second that she’s another dream. “Did I scare you?”

“Fuck yeah,” Rochelle says with a huffed out laugh. She takes a guilty pull off her smoke. “You caught me. I quit for, like, a week. I promise.” She wonders why she’s bothering to justify this to Bonnie, who hadn’t returned her calls since Sarah left town. “You, uh…you can do that still? The pyrokinesis?”

Bonnie’s lip twitch up in a smile. “You know, that term was coined by Stephen King for one of his creepy books. It’s not a real phenomenon.”

Rolling her eyes, Rochelle offers Bonnie the cigarette, and she pauses before accepting it. “It’s real enough for us,” she says, leaning against the cold garage door. She gives Bonnie a once-over, the obvious kind you give a new crush or an old rival. Bonnie looks _good_ —better than before Sarah, even better than after Manon took away her scars. Her hair is longer and a little wilder, and she has a looseness about her that she could never seem to achieve before. And then it hits her like a bucket of cold water. Bonnie looks _free_ , like someone who is washing her hands clean of the last year.

“Bon, are you…going somewhere?”

Bonnie hands the cigarette back to Rochelle. “I was going to tell you earlier, but then I saw you looking at the Burke course book during chem lab last week and got mad at you.”

Rochelle has the decency to feel a _little_ guilty, but it’s not like she and Bonnie have been very close lately. “I just got accepted yesterday. I didn’t want to say anything yet.”

“I can see you there,” Bonnie says. “All big sweaters and Nietzsche and frat parties.”

Rochelle wrinkles her nose. “Not frat parties, I hope.” Bonnie shivers a little and Rochelle thinks of offering her a jacket, but she knows it will feel stilted and weird. She _hates_ it. “Where are you going?”

“Away,” Bonnie says simply, scuffing her boot in the dirt. “I’m thinking of backpacking. America only. I’m not ready for airplanes yet.”

A year ago, Rochelle couldn’t imagine Bonnie in the wilderness, all wild hair and dirty jeans, sleeping on stranger’s couches and in motel rooms. But nothing can surprise her anymore. “Don’t forget your Walkmen,” she says with a smirk. “You might burn out that Veruca Salt tape, though.”

“You know I already have,” Bonnie says, and they laugh. But their laughter is meant for milky dawn, not sunny mornings, and they’ve said all that can be said. When Bonnie walks away, Rochelle wants to reach for her, twine their fingers together, never let her leave again.

*

High school graduation is _so_ 1995, or, at least, that’s what Rochelle tells herself in the car on the way there.

She attends the ceremony more out of duty than desire. She feels like high school burned her out a long time ago. _When you’ve seen levitation and telekinesis at a sleepover, high school just seems like a drag_ , she thinks as she walks across the stage, mechanically smiling and accepting her diploma. Coach is there, and the headmistress and all the nuns, and from beneath the bright auditorium lights, Rochelle can see Laura Lizzie sulking in the back row with a pink scarf tied over her head.

Rochelle knows she should feel bad, but really, she just feels _tired_.

Towards stage right, Bonnie sits with her arms crossed over her chest, her hair falling in her eyes beneath her tassel. When Rochelle’s steps off the stage, Bonnie just bites her thumbnail, eyes never leaving the back of the person’s head in front of her. Rochelle lifts her hand in a half-hearted wave, but drops it quickly, feeling stupid. If Bonnie wanted to say hello, she would’ve said hello.

However, when she walks down the aisle, back to her seat, the auditorium lights brighten, barely enough for the audience to react for enough for Rochelle to stare at Bonnie. Bonnie just smiles and winks.

She always wanted Rochelle to be in the spotlight, even when all Rochelle wanted to do was hide.

*

Rochelle starts off scheduling four classes, bringing her to twelve credits—a lighter load than she wanted, but one she knew she could handle. The Burke course catalog weighed as much as Rochelle’s spellbook and diary combined, and every other class caught her interest. Astronomy, agriculture, sports medicine—there was so _much_ she wanted to do, so much she wanted to explore, but nearly everything she chose was always greeted with a niggling voice in the back of her mind saying _this will help your craft_.

A few months ago, with Nancy in the bin and Sarah gone, Rochelle would’ve willed that voice away. But now, she’s accepted the fact that witchcraft can exist without a sisterhood. Powerful craft? Maybe not. But a safer sort. One that kept her warm at night, one that would always hum under her skin, no matter how badly she fucked it all up.

Her first two courses are basics—calculus and American literature. She was never great at math, but the class met during the afternoon instead of mornings like the rest of the math courses, so calculus would have to do. And she was actually sort of excited about her American literature class. The professor, pictured in the course catalog, was an older black woman with dangling earrings and a soft smile. Rochelle envisioned discussions on Toni Morrison and James Baldwin on the campus lawn amidst lattes and hundreds of pages of crumpled, insightful notes.

She never thought she was destined for Harvard or Yale or whatever, but she also never anticipated the destruction of her GPA and attendance record during her junior year due to unfortunate witchcraft circumstances. Her parents sure as hell weren’t impressed, and the fact that Rochelle even got into a decent college like Burke was enough to make her work her ass off for the next four years.

Rochelle gambled on her other two courses, letting her fingers seek out the courses in the book. This was a turning point, a moment of new decisions, and she wasn’t going to take it lightly. With the book open in her lap, she prepared a spell on the kitchen table while her parents and brother weren’t home. Normally, she did her spells at her altar, but it was currently so full to the brim with candles and stones that another spell would probably send it all crashing down, which could _not_ be a good omen.

Her marbled green chalice sat on a rumpled square of yellow silk in the center of the table. She filled it with warm water from her tea kettle and added a pinch of dried rosemary from her sachet. The last thing she needed was fluorite.

Her gem and stone collection was always the best of all the girls. There was the fact that her family had a bit more money, of course, but Rochelle also felt more of a connection to stones than to herbs or flowers or candles. While those things felt like sprinkled ingredients, used purely to move a spell along, stones felt like an energy source, like the battery that fueled her casting.

Her fluorite is one of her favorite gems. She keeps it on the larger bottom shelf of her tiny curio cabinet, wrapped in black velvet. It’s small, about the size of a quarter, but its colors blend in a vibrant swirl of aqua and deep purple. When she holds it in the center of her palm, the cool, jagged surface feels like a drip of cold water. Goosebumps break out across her skin.

Right as she holds the fluorite above the water, ready to drop it in and begin the chant, the hall telephone rings.

Rochelle curses, the fluorite slipping from her fingers and falling into the water with a dull _plunk_. A veil has been lifted from the room, snapping Rochelle back into shitty reality, and she stands and stomps over the phone after the fourth ring. “Hello?”

“ _It’s Bon_ ,” Bonnie says, as if Rochelle would ever _not_ know her voice. “ _I interrupted something, didn’t I_?”

If Rochelle was angry, she can’t stay that way in this position, leaning against wall with the cord wrapped around her wrist, just like the old days. She spent so many afternoons on the phone like this, eventually sitting on the floor or dragging the phone as far as the cord would allow into her bedroom. “No, don’t worry about it. What’s up?”

There’s a static-filled pause. “ _This sounds so lame, but were you casting? Or chanting, or something?”_

Rochelle exhales deeply, body filled with something like relief. “You can feel it. God, I _knew_ something was changing, I knew—“

“ _I’ll be over in ten_ ,” Bonnie says, and hangs up.

*

“I’m still leaving,” Bonnie says in the doorway, sweater on inside out, hair mussed.

“Me, too,” Rochelle says, and pulls Bonnie in for a kiss that needed to happen a long, _long_ time ago.

*

They lie in bed, covered head to toe in blankets, trying to retain the warmth from their earlier lovemaking. The house is still drafty, and the glow of the candles feels distant. On the bedside table, two yellow candles burn on a silver tray, which rests atop a now-battered copy of _Harry Potter_.

Rochelle laughs, warm breath on Bonnie’s arm. “You’re reading my book, I see.”

“Am not,” Bonnie insists, but she grins at Rochelle from above the blanket, cheeks pink. “It’s a cute story. They used wands. I wish _we_ had wands.”

Rochelle looks at Bonnie, smiling softly. “Do you think what we do…is magic? I mean, really magic?”

Bonnie furrows her brow. “What do you mean?”

Rochelle sighs, falling back on the sheets, tugging a giggling Bonnie down with her. The bed is too small for the two of them, a child’s twin bed, but it’s enough. “I mean, we make things happen, but are they so magical, in the end? What we do to others comes back to use sevenfold. I get that, but how is it any different from the real world? Isn’t it all just smoke and mirrors?”

Bonnie raises an eyebrow. “This might be a little philosophical for two in the morning, babe.”

Rochelle laughs—she can’t _not_ , now that they’re back together, her and Bonnie against the world. “I mean it, though. We bit off more than we could chew in school, and there was so much darkness there, but now it’s like…we make things happen without trying. Like just our thoughts make things better. No elaborate rituals or blood sacrifices needed.”

Bonnie thinks for a moment, lashes fluttering against Rochelle’s shoulder. “Maybe this is what we’ve been working towards. Balance. No power struggle involved.” She reaches over to the bedside table and takes another of Rochelle’s stones into her hand—a piece of glass-smooth rose quartz. She ducks in and whispers against the stone, lips pressed against the cool surface, “Goddess Harmonia, please bless this love for us.” She then looks up, eyes playful. “How could we go wrong with something like that?”

Rochelle knows things will be hard. Things will go wrong. She’ll be off to college, Bonnie will be travelling the world. Letters and phone calls will suffice, but there will still be longing. Through all of this, the only thing that matters is that she has Bonnie _now_ , after long last, after all the bullshit they’ve been through. She takes Bonnie’s hand in hers, squeezing their fingers around the stone. “Bless this love, Harmonia,” she says, and kisses Bonnie’s knuckles.

 _Blessed be_ , she thinks, and knows Bonnie is thinking it, too.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Veruca Salt's "Volcano Girls."


End file.
